CICADA: A Stone Age World Novel (12 page)

A few heads shook.

“Me neither. We’re not asking you to believe everything we’re being told, but I believe that Bios-2 is our best chance of survival. Westerling and Lunder and the rest need us as much as we need them.”

“But how do we know that they will do what they say?” Babinski continued his rant.

Melanie closed her eyes and hoped Carr was having more luck with his challenge.

Carrington ran into a brick wall of a guard at the entrance of the mystery room: they were all physical specimens, but this man was a towering hulk who must have been fed a diet of only meat and steroids. He appeared strikingly like a certain green comic-book character, only a bit more flesh-toned.

“This area is restricted,” said the guard, in a higher pitched voice than expected.

“Oh, sorry. I’m Dr. Carrington Reid. I’m working on a project for Mr. Westerling. I need to get in here.”

“Unless you get approval from Mr. Westerling and I have that approval in writing, you cannot go in there. No one is allowed in there,” he said, solid as the building around them.

Another scientist in a lab coat walked past Carrington and said, “Hi, Harry. I’m just running a couple tests. I’ll be out in ten minutes.” He marched to the door’s thumbprint access panel. Almost as quickly as he put his thumb on the pad, the door clicked open and he breezed in like he was walking into the public dining area to get water.

“No problem, Dr. Tenaka. We’ll see you in ten,” Harry said with a smile that morphed into a sneer when he glared back down at Dr. Reid.

Carrington tried to remember Dr. Tenaka.
That’s right
, he thought. He’s a nuclear physicist who kept to himself mostly, and until now, Carrington had no idea where Tenaka worked.
So, what was a nuclear physicist doing in a geothermal production plant?
And why wasn’t Carrington asked to work with him? Something felt very wrong and he had to figure it out.

“Dr. Reid?” Harry called.

“Yes.”

“If there’s nothing else, get back to work.”

He had a plan, but he wanted to run it by Melanie first. It was very risky and he wanted to make sure she was okay with it. If his suspicions were correct, it would be worth the risk.

“Yes, I’ll get that approval from Mr. Westerling.” He headed up the stairs, one step at a time. Each step lifted his level of anxiety.

“Come in,” Max hollered at his front door. The pretense of this being his sanctuary was already gone. He downed the tequila, his first shot in many years, and felt it warm and burn his gut; it was the desired effect.

The morning’s light burst through his front door, as if Helios crashed his chariot right there, setting fire to the earth and depositing Magdalena. She tentatively stepped in, with light appearing to seep from her pores.

Halting momentarily at the pictures on the wall, just long enough for them to register, she was visible from the living room. “Max?” she called out, not seeing him.

“Hi, Magdalena. I'm back here,” Max said softly from the murky rear of the room.

“Why are you in the—”

A click, and a rush of sunlight spilled from the blinds behind Max. He sat at a desk, empty except for a computer monitor on one side and a tequila bottle and a shot glass on the other.

He rose, grabbed both bottle and glass and seized another glass from a bookshelf as he ambled over to her.

As he plopped into one end of the living room couch, a cloud of dust billowed up like a thousand little pinpricks dancing in the beams of the morning light shooting through the open door. He cursed himself for not letting someone in to clean this place in the couple years since he had last been here. He beckoned her to the other end and poured tequila into both glasses.

She accepted the glass. “Thanks, but—”

Max held up his hand. “Please, just one toast.”

“Okay, then what shall we toast to?”

“Safety, or being alive, or”—he thought for a moment—“or how about to you for making it here, or hell, I don't care, let's just have a drink.”

“I didn't think you drank.”

“I don't, but I found lots of good reasons to have one today.”

“Okay, let's toast to safety then.” Magdalena extended her glass to Max's.

“To safety.” He clinked her glass and drank his shot down in one gulp as she watched and took a sip. “It really is good to see you.” Max smiled and poured another drink and held out the bottle to her.

She shook her head and took another small sip.

They sat quietly and without any awkwardness. He studied her and immediately realized she was more beautiful than he had remembered when he came to her aid in Mexico; also, she was older. Maybe it was because she looked similar to his beloved Fatima, and he wanted her to be unattainable, and therefore too young. Plus, she had been on her way to Cicada and he was off to find the Kings. Or maybe it was just the stress of surviving the ongoing apocalypse that made her look older.

But it wasn’t stress. Her face carried the visible signs of someone who was in her thirties, not barely twenty, as he had assumed. The delightful lines around her eyes and the soft contours around her lips were of a woman and not the girl he had told himself she was.

Besides her age, Max had two revelations about Magdalena right then, sitting with her on his sofa. She didn’t really look like Fatima. Magdalena looked like her own person: strong, wise and beautiful in her own way. He also realized at that moment that he could love her.

He was beaming, feeling the warm glow of the happiness that could be his.

Then the burden of his thoughts crashed back on him, crushing his momentary joy. He would have to worry about one more person at a time and place where he had little control.

Like a reflection of his mood, the sun hid behind a giant cloud, and just as quickly, the brightness faded from the room and from him.

She fidgeted in her seat, breaking his thoughts. She had something to say but seemed hesitant to speak.

“Are you okay?” she asked as she watched him drink another shot down as if it were water.

He didn't answer. Okay? Of course he wasn't okay. He had just executed a man and then gunned down two more innocents, all in the name of safety for Cicada and the people he cared about. He was again becoming that same person he had been in Basra. Yet, if he didn't do what he had to do, Cicada would eventually fall into the hands of the barbarians outside, who were receiving military-grade equipment from some outside source. Tom and he confirmed this when they swung by the split aspen and found the package of explosives waiting for the man who would never use them.

No, he was not okay. Worse, he was beginning to believe that this was his penance for past misdeeds; he had to be the protector of this place, regardless of what the future held. And he certainly couldn’t open himself to the love of another woman.

“Yeah, I'm fine.” He poured himself another drink.

There was a rapid bang on the doorframe followed by “Mr. Thompson, are you in?” through the wide-open door.

She put her glass down and bounded up. “I'm going to go. Thanks for the drink.”

A different voice called from the blazing doorway, the raging morning light still pouring through in torrents. “Mr. Thompson, sorry to bother you, but we really need to talk to you.”

“I'll be right there,” he yelled. To her, he spoke softly. “Please don't go.”

“I think I have to,” she faltered. “I don't want to see what happens next. I care about you too much.” At the doorway, she stopped and turned to him. “I know you think you need to do whatever it takes to keep everyone safe, but consider the costs. The man I left in Mexico took the time to save several people, even though it meant he’d be delayed in meeting up with his friends and maybe helping them further. I'm not sure what happened to that man. I'd love to sit and talk with
him
for a while.” She vanished into the light as the two men burst in.

Max was frozen in place, his shot glass poised at his lips. He held it there; for the first time since opening this old treasured bottle, the tequila’s sweetness danced on his nostrils, never fully there, like her. But her words bit harder than the tequila’s burn. He had had too much of both.

“Sorry, Mr. Thompson, but this is real important,” one of them said. Max put the glass down and looked up at the outlines of two men in lab coats. His thoughts were already muddy from the alcohol and his fatigue made it hard to focus on them in the bright sunlight.

The older and shorter of the two said, “We’ve figured out why the CMEs never stop!”

Westerling had stolen everything he needed from Cicada: the idea and plans for the Cicada complex, courtesy of one of his most senior people; then some of Thompson’s land—seizing it by using a federal statute on grazing; and then just before and after the Event, many of their scientists. Now he wanted the prize, too. He wanted Cicada. It wasn’t that he wanted to control the land or their personnel or even their resources anymore. He wanted them to fail.

There were many reasons for this, but the reasons didn’t include a need. He didn’t
need
them to fail for Bios-2 and therefore his daughter and granddaughter to prosper. It was much more of a want, a desire that gnawed at him, like regret did for most people; he didn’t suffer regret. It was probably a pride issue for Westerling, and he had no problem admitting it. Cicada represented the one thing he couldn’t yet control in a world in which he controlled so much, and that bothered him. They had control over the Outsiders outside their walls, and the crazy sun-drenched environment around them, but they couldn’t control Cicada.

And yet, what bothered the senator most was Maxwell Thompson. Because Cicada was
his
, a hand-me-down from Thompson’s great-granddad, along with his fortune, all the while Thompson played on the beach in Mexico.

For all of these reasons Westerling wanted Cicada to go down and he wanted it now. He knew they would eventually fail, but he was tired of waiting. He wanted them taken out and taken out immediately. And now that Thompson was there, he could strike down the two headaches at once. He had asked Lunder to come up with a plan that could be executed within a day or two.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I must disagree with the whole idea. Cicada will fall, and probably sooner than later. Why commit resources to a bold plan when under the current one we don’t have to expend many resources at all, and we still get the same result?” The German’s hands were flying around so much to make his point, Westerling would have thought he was an Italian with a German accent.

“I don’t want to wait. We have them on the ropes. Now is the time to strike. We can take them down and take their resources to replace those we’ve expended. Plus, we’ll get the bonus of maybe getting some more of their scientists. Most of all, I want it because I want to rub a dead Cicada into Thompson’s face. Then, all that inheritance and planning will have been worth nothing. That’s what I want and I expect you to make it happen.”

Lunder realized he would lose this argument, if it was something Westerling really wanted, as he apparently did now. He’d have to follow orders. At least he gave it his best shot, but still prepared for this contingency.

“Okay, sir,” he said while unrolling a set of plans on the coffee table. The leather sofa squeaked as he reached over and placed each of their coffee mugs on the first two corners of the plans. The final two points of the plans were held in place with Westerling’s cigar ashtray and his own trusty Luger, given to him by his father from the War.

“There,” he pointed to the coffee-mug side of the plans, “is our point of penetration. It will take us a while to get enough men through there. But, if we’re careful and quiet, we’ll take them by surprise. We’ll also need to coordinate with our Outsider contact and have them mount an assault at the same time we arrive at their flank, to keep them busy. This should work, sir.”

“Excellent. I love the idea. I knew we would use this to our advantage someday. When can we take ’em down?”

“Give me a day to pick our assault team and a day to get there and be ready for the diversion. So, in two days we can strike. It should take about an hour to take out their defenses and then we’ll have them.”

Westerling’s intercom buzzed and he punched the button. “Yes?”

“Sir, there are three men at the front gate, asking to speak to the senator.”

“Do we know who they are?”

“They’re the ones who executed the leader of our Outsiders this morning.”

Westerling took a sip of coffee and smiled at Lunder, who nodded in the affirmative. “Okay, Reynolds, let’s give an audience to their leader only. I will only speak to their top leader. I’m counting on you to not waste my time with underlings. Once he’s cleared, bring him to my office.” Westerling punched the intercom button again, severing the connection.

“Is that wise, sir, bringing a stranger into your office?” Lunder asked, sitting back in the leather couch.

“I want to meet the man who has the huevos to put on today’s display. Besides, we may be able to use him and his troops with your plan, if you can speed it up a day.”